David Cameron’s speech occupied the centre ground against Labour's
retro-socialism

At the end of the party conference season, the political dividing lines are clearer than for many years. Ed Miliband, who had sought to lay claim to the mantle of One Nation centrism, has abandoned that territory, allowing David Cameron to move on to the vacated ground.

Unlike the Labour leader’s address in Brighton (and, to a lesser extent, Nick Clegg’s to the Liberal Democrats three weeks ago) there were few announcements or gimmicky policy promises from Mr Cameron in Manchester yesterday. His speech was deliberately pitched to the country, not the people in the hall, to the point where he looked directly into the television camera rather than at his audience. He wanted to come across as confident, competent and optimistic, and succeeded in all three ambitions.

After Mr Miliband’s retro-socialist revival, it must have been tempting for the Tory leader to indulge in an extended bout of “Red Ed” bashing, to remind his audience and the country of the calamitous events that followed the most recent election of a nakedly Left-wing Labour Party. There were, indeed, passing references to “a return to the Seventies”, but Mr Cameron did not overdo the parallels. Rather, he set out to make his point by defending wealth creation and profit-making, whose virtues were finally acknowledged by the Labour Party under Tony Blair in the Nineties, which resulted in its winning three elections. Mr Miliband’s decision to move his party to the Left is therefore as defining an event in recent British politics as the New Labour putsch 20 years ago.

Mr Cameron emphasised – just as his Cabinet colleagues have done all week – how much he wanted to win an election outright in 2015, and be shot of the pact with the Lib Dems. Yet this was not a speech that would unduly alarm Mr Clegg (whose own position has strengthened following his party conference). It reinforced the growing feeling that both leaders are content to work towards a second coalition, despite their protestations to the contrary – and the strong antipathy of grassroots activists in both parties.

There were few fireworks or rhetorical flourishes in Mr Cameron’s speech, which made it strangely flat; but it was not necessarily the worse for that. The country is weary of politicians promising things they cannot deliver, or pretending to have solutions to intractable problems. Mr Cameron was quite deliberately low-key, putting himself forward as the steady hand on the tiller, the man who would steer the economy and the country into calmer waters. At the same time, he was honest about how hard a task that is – although he did accept that the signs of economic recovery will make it somewhat easier. As a result, he could legitimately claim to offer a “land of opportunity”, in contrast to Mr Miliband’s downbeat insistence that “we can do better than this”.

Mr Cameron’s speech did not just occupy the centre ground, but showed how far he and his party have shifted it. It is no longer considered Right-wing to propose restrictions on immigration or to reform and cap welfare. Indeed, the one new announcement concerned the payment of benefits, a subject that exercises a good many voters who would not consider themselves to be on the Right. Mr Cameron is proposing to adopt an “earn or learn” model, under which young people below the age of 25 would not be able to live on state handouts but would have to be in work, training or education. “Today it is still possible to leave school, sign on, find a flat, start claiming housing benefit and opt for a life on benefits. It’s time for bold action here,” Mr Cameron said. “We should ask if that option should really exist at all.” To a majority of taxpayers, the answer is obvious. There are even suggestions that the Lib Dem leadership is sympathetic to this idea. As for Labour, they failed the young unemployed when they were in office – so why should anyone believe they have any answers now?

Although there is another party conference season to be endured next autumn, the election campaign has already begun. Labour has returned to the statist, interventionist and unashamedly socialist outlook that Mr Blair ditched, leaving the Tories to reclaim the values of opportunity and aspiration. It still feels hard to believe – after the Left were so comprehensively defeated in Labour’s ideological civil war – that it is actually possible once more for a Tory leader to portray his opponents as business-bashers. The great achievement of the Blairites was to end the party’s association with the idea that profit and enterprise are dirty words; yet Mr Miliband has now put himself on the wrong side of this argument.

Over the next 18 months, the Tories need to drive home this central message – that Labour wants to take us back down the road to penury, is still unable to understand that without enterprise and profits, there will be no jobs of any kind, nor the social programmes that the Left seems to think pay for themselves. We have long urged Mr Cameron to put distance between the Tories and Labour; but in the end it was Mr Miliband who made the decisive break.